Sacred Force Fire, Sacred Force Flame

[setsuled]

I really enjoyed last night's Acolyte, I found myself getting caught up in he story. Called "Destiny", it was directed by Kogonada, a man mainly known for making video essays and supplements for The Criterion Channel. He certainly understands pace and flow and that pays off well. Interestingly, though, I found myself reminded more of Star Trek: The Next Generation than of Star Wars. The teleplay by Jasmyne Flournoy and Eileen Shim focuses on relationships and anthropological problems and some of the sets looked like TNG or maybe '70s Doctor Who.

It's a flashback episode, taking us to that incident 16 years earlier that precipitated the events depicted in the first two episodes. The twins, Osha and Mae, are kids living with an all female coven of witches on a planet called Brendok. A lot of people are comparing them to the witches of Dathomir but I found myself reminded more of the Sisterhood of Karn from Doctor Who. The tension between been men and women is fundamental to The Brain of Morbius, the 1976 serial that introduced the Sisterhood, but the reasons for excluding men among the Brendok witches are never mentioned.



I was intrigued to find the episode has an essentially pro-colonial message. The witches are Force users but they call the Force the "Thread". Osha and Mae's mother, Aniseya, tries to explain the difference between their beliefs and those of the Jedi but it's never really clear. She claims it's the Jedi who believe they manipulate the Force while the witches see it as something else. It's really vague and makes less sense when you recall the dialogue between Luke and Obi-wan about how the Force partially controls one's actions but also obeys one's commands. When Aniseya deliberately uses a push power on specific targets, it sure seems to be obeying her commands.

Osha wants to be a Jedi and everyone in the coven turns into a snarling villain about it except Aniseya, who's at least open-minded enough to allow Osha to pursue her own path. I was reminded of Chinua Achebe's 1958 novel Things Fall Apart, a foundational book in the literature examining colonialism. It makes the point that the very presence of missionaries disrupts the native culture not with violence but by simply expanding the perspectives of the local inhabitants. If Osha had never heard of the Jedi, she never would've thought of joining them and there would've been a better chance for the witches to maintain their isolated beliefs. Since they're not immortal, though, they can't have been doing this for very long; I don't get the impression everyone was "created" the way Osha and Mae were.



As in Things Fall Apart, in which culturally sanctioned domestic violence is threatened by the invasion of a gentler foreign philosophy, the Jedi present to Osha an alternative to her xenophobic sister and fellow witches. Considering how dangerous the Force can be, however flawed the Jedi's philosophy of controlling emotions may be, this episode demonstrates it may be necessary and, comparatively, certainly more humane. Of course, if it ends up the Jedi murdered the witches, as some are speculating, that A) wouldn't make much sense and/or B) change the concept of the Jedi fundamentally.

By the way, I'm reviewing the new episodes of Doctor Who on my blog, if anyone's interested.

The Acolyte is available on Disney+.

Comments

[yourlibrarian]

Yes, I also found it unclear what the difference was between the witches view and use of the Force and the Jedi's. One thing I found interesting was the mystery of how Osha and Mae were created and whether or not this tied into Anakin's birth. From the looks of things it appears that Mae got all the force strength and Osha got very little (given that she was certainly desperate enough to compel it on the ship, were it usually within her power). At the same time, had she no ability she wouldn't have been taken by the Jedi in the first place.

So while some questions were answered by this episode I still found a lot hanging. I found the first episode a very mixed bag (how was Osha supposed to have committed the murder while being on a ship full of people elsewhere? No one from that ship seemed to be interviewed nor their records checked?) However I did enjoy the opening fight scene and agree that these have been a strong point. (I also enjoyed seeing Jason from The Good Place in quite a different role).